Whether we are athletic or not, sport occupies an important place in our lives. Very recently, the death of the Blond Demon brought to the surface a thousand and one memories of the beautiful era of the Glorious. Sports journalists, hockey lovers and onlookers, all had their little story to tell.
“Sport plays a huge role,” adds James Hyndman, met between two days of shooting Fragments, new series by Serge Boucher. Quite rightly, we talk a lot about culture; a tune that runs through our minds instantly brings back memories, but it’s true that sport also has this ability, has something very unifying. I played sports all my life, I was on the Quebec volleyball team when I was young; I therefore have memories that are directly linked to the competitions. Even for people who don’t practice sport, there are moments that are part of the collective culture, of the collective unconscious, like the Maurice Richard riot or, among the French, Noah’s victory in 1983.
There is also this consistency in tennis, both among amateurs and professionals, to be faced with all your demons. We are faced with ourselves, with what we wear best and worst in ourselves. Players spend a lifetime managing and muzzling the demons that always want to come out and are more of a drag than anything else. We witness that when we are in the stands.
Long before writing False bounces, his third book, where we relive, through his memories of the clay court, family anecdotes and reflections on the male condition, some parts of the history of tennis, from Drobny to Djoko, passing by Billie Jean King, Borg, Mac, Graf, Seles, and, closer to us, Shapovalov and Auger-Aliassime, James Hyndman understood that sport and culture were not irreconcilable. Passionate about literature having devoted himself for 12 years to public readings, “a form of priesthood that has nourished me from every point of view”, the actor wanted one day to think outside the box and present texts on the bike, which was for a long time one of his passions.
“In 2008, at the Cinquième Salle at Place des Arts, I read a collection of texts by Paul Fournel and Pierre Foglia, writers who have a truly literary way of telling stories. The room had vibrated. Foglia didn’t want to know anything about the word “writer”, but when we read The tour of Foglia, a collection of chronicles that he has reworked, we understand that he is a great sports writer. There was something very familiar in the tone at times, biting, epic, lyrical, earthy. Everyone tried to copy it, but no one succeeded. »
Seize the ball on the leap
Thanks to an invitation from the magazine Tennis Magazine in 2015, the fiery tennis player, who has long played in competitive leagues, was able to polish his pen. For five years, the one who played the sports journalist Benoît Dumais, emulator of Foglia, in Rumorsa series by Isabelle Langlois, wrote about tennis in her own way without ever receiving comments.
“It was better that way because I continued to do my little business without caring what anyone might think of it. As I was not paid, from the first column, the one about my uncle who refereed at Wimbledon in 1946, I told myself that I had all the rights, that I was going to have fun and take advantage of it to throw the bases of what could be a book where I would explore all kinds of forms, fiction, non-fiction, soliloquy, dialogue, a tribute to I remember, a magnificent book by Perec, etc., and that I would try to astonish the reader by passing from one form to another, from one story to another. »
Before achieving this, however, the aspiring writer was going to publish two books with XYZ, oceans (2018) and An adult life (2020): “ An adult life was the first one I started writing in a really unfinished form. I said it was from my diary, but three-quarters of the book had nothing to do with my diary. I left wondering how I could indulge in an exercise in autofiction without lapsing into complacency, without talking too much about myself. Suddenly I wrote the soliloquies ofoceans for a summer; not knowing if he had something there or not, I made Tristan read them [Malavoy], who told me he liked them and was ready to publish them. »
Somehow, False bouncesof which half of the twenty or so short texts are his revamped tennis chronicles, seems to mark the end of a cycle of writing.
“The vein will run out and I will die as an author, he jokes. It is true that there is a chapter that is closing. Usually I would write a chapter of a draft and then spend a lot of time polishing it. I still felt like I wasn’t a writer, even though I’ve been writing for years. I have always been aware of my limits and I said to myself with what I have, I really have to work hard. »
find his breath
If the next cycle will be different, that it will not adopt the fragmentary form that has suited it until now, James Hyndman, who is preparing a television series with a screenwriter and a feature film script with a director, warns that he is still short of breath. Yet we feel in this third book that he gained confidence, that he wrote with more freedom than in the previous ones.
“The soliloquies ofoceans remained very close to me, even if I lent this voice to all kinds of characters; obviously, An adult life, it is the obligatory passage to speak about oneself, while preserving the mystery because I have an intimate life which matters to me and which results in the writing, the public readings. In False bounces, there is a little more fantasy, a lot of humor. »
As well as a bittersweet je-ne-sais-quoi and a melancholy that runs through it all. “That’s the word that sums up my life!” he launches into a great burst of laughter. I didn’t want it to be too much there, but we find it in the first chapter [«Le mur »], in the passages about my father. I also make fun of all this kind of rage, violence with the rackets, which is also a kind of admission of helplessness, frustration, disappointed expectations. »
And of course, we find in the writing this elegance that we immediately associate with the actor and with this sport descending from tennis.
“There is also this consistency in tennis, both among amateurs and professionals, of being faced with all your demons. We are faced with ourselves, with what we wear best and worst in ourselves. Players spend a lifetime managing and muzzling the demons that always want to come out and are more of a drag than anything else. We witness that when we are in the stands. »
Was it the fear of facing his own demons that kept the actor from embracing his literary vocation for so long?
“For years, writers have been my brothers; they are the ones who carried me. I sincerely think that the desire to write was there since I was 11 or 12 years old, but that I had absolutely no confidence to do it, that I had too many narcissistic wounds of all kinds and that it took that I go through the game, to be seen, to be on stage, to be recognized in this way to appease things before being able, perhaps, to write. When I started writing, I wasn’t sure if it was to be published. I think that today I realize that the relationship to books, to authors, was very deep. »